Think you can beat this computer at poker? (Updated)

Researchers at the University of Alberta, Canada, think they've made the perfect poker-playing program and are inviting people to play against it.

The software, dubbed Cepheus, is a machine-learning system that has been taught to play a variant of Texas Hold 'em called heads-up limit, where players can only bet fixed amounts and do so a fixed number of times. The program was "taught" using more than 4,000 CPUs each considering over six billion hands every second.

Michael Bowling, a professor in the university's faculty of science, said: "It was trained against itself, playing the equivalent of more than a billion billion hands of poker."

"With each hand it improved its play, refining itself closer and closer to the perfect solution. The program was trained for two months using more than 4,000 CPUs each considering over six billion hands every second. This is more poker than has been played by the entire human race."

"The breakthroughs behind this result are general algorithmic advances that make game-theoretic reasoning in large-scale models of any sort more tractable," said Bowling.